Toddler Tank Dress {Upcycled}

Toddler Tank Dress {Upcycled} | Turn an old ribbed tank top into a cute little toddler dress. An easy and inexpensive diy upcycle!

I’m not a very go with the flow kind of person. You aren’t shocked, are you?

I wouldn’t say I’m organized, okay, I’m definitely not organized. But I do like order. I want things to go a certain way (my way), and I struggle when they don’t. (Though the few curve balls that life has thrown at me, and the two children who hardly ever do things the way I want them to have sure helped me work on this little . . . quirk.)

Which is maybe why when it comes to crafting and baking I’m super go with the flow. Like maybe too go with the flow. I like to go off of recipe, and I have yet to follow a sewing pattern.

I like to make things up as I go along, and sit back in awe when they happen to go well.

Like with this tank dress.

After all the great feedback I got from Quinn’s Fourth of July Bandana Dress last year, I knew that I wanted to make something for her to wear again this summer and I had this old tank top laying around . . . and yup, that’s the tutorial!

Okay, I can give you a little more than that, but not much more, because I kind of made it up as I went along.

You want to start by cutting the tank top apart, into a front and a back – two pieces.

You can see by where I placed the pins on the straps about how much needed to come off to fit little Quinn (she’s in a size 18 month if you are wondering about sizing).

The neck hole ended up being too low, so I added some of what I was going to use for the skirt, ironically, an old bed skirt. Yup, just a couple bucks from Goodwill, and I got all that great white eyelet material.

The skirt was going to be just one layer, but at the last minute I decided it would be much cuter with two. I did some pleating with the skirt, sewed in the pleats, and then attached them to the tank top so that the seams would be on the inside.

This is what I will say about sewing on the skirt piece. I wish I had used elastic thread! The material has absolutely no give to it, so even though I used a zig-zag stitch, it still is really stiff and kind of difficult to get Quinn into.

Though I must say, the cuteness more than makes up for it.

And then in the end, I pulled out some scrap fabric from the Picnic Party Apparel, and added a little fabric flower.

One more picture and then I’m done, I swear.

This is Quinn after the pictures outside, for which she had been promised a cookie, and before she actually got the cookie. I’m pretty sure she thought she had been duped.